Infrastructure

BI Publisher

Oracle BI Publisher offers you the most efficient, scalable reporting solution available for complex, distributed environments. It provides a central architecture for generating and delivering information to employees, customers, and suppliers—both securely and in the right format. Oracle BI Publisher reduces the high costs associated with the development, customization and maintenance of business documents; while increasing the efficiency of reports management. Furthermore, it reduces a company's dependency on third party software systems that are required to format business documents, reducing the complexity of your reporting infrastructure. Utilizing a set of familiar desktop tools such as Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Office users can create and maintain their own report formats based on data extracts supplied by a multitude of sources.

Separate Data, Layout, and Translation

The days of a single report file containing data, layout and translation are gone. BI Publisher separates the data, layout and translation into three distinct objects. Customers now have huge flexibility in their reporting architecture, single data sources can support multiple layouts and consequently single layouts can now support multiple translations. There is no longer the need for expensive consulting fees to build reports in a complex reporting tool. The process of creating reports becomes much simpler:

Data - the IT department can concentrate on what they know best - extracting the company data from their systems.

Layout – business consultants now have familiar desktop tools to create the layouts they want to build rather than having to describe them to an engineer

Translation – BI Publisher uses an industry standard translation format (XLIFF) that can be updated by a local company office or sent to a commercial translator.

At runtime BI Publisher brings these three reusable pieces back together to create the final output for the end user.

Data from anywhere

BI Publisher can accept and format any well formed BI data. This means that BI Publisher can be integrated into any database, application or process that can generate BI whether that be a database, an ERP application or a Web service to format output and deliver to consumers. BI Publisher also allows you to bring data in from multiple data sources into a single output document.

Open Standard Templates

BI Publisher allows users to create the layout formats using familiar desktop tools such as MS Word, Excel and Adobe Acrobat; plug-ins to these applications make the creation of layouts even simpler for the user. These template formats are all open standards meaning the customer is not locked into using them. BI Publisher uses the Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Object (XSL-FO) as the underlying technology. There are many editors on the market that allow the user to visually create these templates and potentially any RTF editor can be used to create the layouts too.

RTF Templates – these templates provide the user complete freedom to create the exact layout they want. All of the expected report features are supported in these templates such as tables, forms, boilerplate blocks, conditional formatting, page totals and page breaks. In addition to this the user can embed special fonts into the template to support barcodes, check printing, etc in the final output. For more detail on the template features click here.

PDF Forms – just about every government in the world expects companies to communicate with them in a specific format, namely PDF. BI Publisher allows the user to download these forms from the government, map the data fields therein to your data source and you are done. At run-time, BI Publisher will merge your data into the PDF form and effectively fill it, the government gets back the exact format they gave you but with your data inside.

Excel – every financial analyst wants to get their data in an Excel format and carry out modeling exercises on it. The Excel template allows them to do just this. The user can build complex modeling scenarios using pivot tables, charts, etc in Excel as a template. At runtime BI Publisher merges the data into the sheet and once opened in Excel the modeling scenarios are rendered based on the incoming data.

eText – communicating in a B2B world currently requires most likely one of two formats: Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) most commonly used to move funds from bank to bank to pay suppliers, etc or Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) used to communicate everything from an invoice to a student record. BI Publisher supports both of these formats, using another RTF template format the user can quickly build a template that formats data into the EFT or EDI format. These can include complex calculations, string manipulations, etc.

Rich set of report features

High fidelity formatting

Charting

Multiple objects in one report

Multiple tabular reports and a full range of charting options

High degree of report interactivity (filter, sort, hide column)

Conditional formatting

Ease report template creation

A broad range of formulas and functions out of box

Multiple Formats

BI Publisher supports multiple output formats including:

PDF – these are pixel perfect documents that can be secured at runtime using a password, encryption and even a digital signature

RTF – this format allows users to open the file in their word processing application for further editing or collaborative updates.

HTML – a classic online format, reports can be generated and delivered to a web server for users to view online. Interactivity can be built into the reports allowing users to drill down to other linked reports.

Excel – the ability to open a report output in Excel for many financial consultants is priceless. They are now able to use native Excel functionality to complete analysis on the generated data.

Delivery Anywhere

BI Publisher is able to deliver your documents to multiple delivery channels in a secure and rapid fashion to the familiar destinations, email, fax and printer. In addition it can also deliver output via HTTP, FTP and WebDAV opening a world of possibilities to integrate BI Publisher into other document management systems.

Performance, Scalability, Language support

BI Pu are now able to use native Excel functionality to complete analysis on the generated daow able to use native Excel functionality to complete analysis on the generated data.

Dive Excel functionality to complete analysis on the generated data.

Delivery Anywhere

BI Publisher is able to deliver your documents to multiple delivery channels in a secure and rapid fashion to the familiar destinations, email, fax and printer. In addition it can also deliver output via HTTP, FTP and WebDAV opening a world of possibilities to integrate BI Publisher into other document management systems.

Performance, Scalability, Language support

BI Pu are now able to use native Excel functionality to complete analysis on the generated daow able to use native Excel functionality to complete analysis on the generated data.

Delivery Anywhere

BI Publisher is able to deliver your documents to multiple delivery channels in a secure and rapid fashion to the familiar destinations, email, fax and printer. In addition it can also deliver output via HTTP, FTP and WebDAV opening a world of possibilities to integrate BI Publisher into other document management systems.

Performance, Scalability, Language support

BI Pu are now able to use native Excel functionality to complete analysis on the generated daow able to use native Excel functionality to complete analysis on the generated data.

Delivery Anywhere

BI Publisher is able to deliver your documents to multiple delivery channels in a secure and rapid fashion to the familiar destinations, email, fax and printer. In addition it can also deliver output via HTTP, FTP and WebDAV opening a world of possibilities to integrate BI Publisher into other document management systems.

Performance, Scalability, Language support

BI Pu are now able to use native Excel functionality to complete analysis on the generated daow able to use native Excel functionality to complete analysis on the generated data.

Based on industry and technology standards

BI Publisher is a J2EE application that can be deployed to any J2EE container such as OC4J (others). Data is handled as XML and the layout templates created in the desktop applications are internally converted to XSL-FO another W3C standard. The outputs generated by the application are also industry standards such as SVG, PDF, RTF and HTML The delivery protocols used are again, all open standards, e.g. Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), WebDav, FTP, AS2. BI Publisher is all about standards

Multiple design tools, one runtime engine

Using a familiar set of desktop applications customer can create report layouts using their tool of choice. The tool given to the Marketing department cannot be the same for the Financial department. BI Publisher provides several design tools to satisfy each customer type and the report they want to generate. For instance HR customers use Adobe Acrobat to interact with governments, Financial customers want to use Excel and Marketing/Service customers want to use Word. There is a simple add-on available for each tool to improve development productivity.

Benefits

Multiple document output formats

Report layouts developed and maintained using familiar desktop applications

Reduced costs and complexity by eliminating third party solution

Developed completely on open standards

Large number of supported document delivery channels and protocols

Frequent Asked Questions

1. Oracle is too expensive.

Oracle is actually much cheaper than purchasing individual licenses for Business Objects, Cognos and other niche vendors.

2. We already have BI solutions from other vendors and are very satisfied.

If customer is very satisfied with existing tools, position BI Publisher as the means to generate and deliver consolidated reports using desktop tools to build the layouts.

3. Oracle products are hard to install .

Oracle BI Publisher is fast and easy to install, you can be up and running in minutes not hours.

4. Oracle tools are hard to use.

Your users are using familiar desktop applications to build reports … how easy can it get?

5. Oracle tools work only with Oracle database.

BI Publisher can use any well formed XML data from any source.

6. Oracle tools do not work with SAP applications data.

See above

7. Don´t want to purchase or install the Oracle Application Server simply to use query and reporting functionality.

BI Publisher is a stand alone product; It can be installed on any J2EE compliant web server and can use data from any data source.